NOVANEWS
Industrial Report to Central Committee, 8th June 2013
Labour’s “fair” cuts
In addition to announcing their intention to set a cap on welfare spending, Milliband and Balls are also retreating from their earlier supposedly “principled” opposition to means testing, instead requiring recipients of the winter fuel subsidy to prove they are poor enough to qualify and declining to defend the universality of child benefit. Whilst posing as an egalitarian attack on handouts to the privileged, these moves simply ensure that such benefits will come to be identified as “poor people’s benefits” which can safely be left to dwindle away once deprived of the support of influential middle class opinion.
Lobbying bill: a ConDem stunt
The BBC/Telegraph sting operation on peers of the realm eager to peddle their political influence for hard cash has prompted the ConDems to table a face-saving Bill on lobbying. Whilst ostensibly aimed at rooting out corruption, the Bill also sneaks in a couple of other clauses with a very different intention.
The first is the end of self-certification by unions of their membership lists. Henceforth unions would be required to submit to an annual audit of their members under the supervision of a certification officer appointed by the state and empowered to conduct investigations into the numbers produced. The usefulness of this fresh intrusion of the state into the way unions organise themselves will not be lost on corporate lawyers earning their living by finding technicalities with which to subvert democratic strike ballots.
The second bolt-on measure aims to reduce the scope trade unions have for giving material support to the Labour party. At present, for example, if Labour asks a union to print an election leaflet, it need only include in the declaration of expenses the bare cost of printing. Under the new dispensation, the declaration would have to include all the overheads like staffing and office-rent.
George Eaton’s New Statesman blog on this issue is unintentionally comical. Arguing that union hand-outs to Labour should be a badge of democratic honour, not shame, he cites in support the words of the Tory MP for Harlow, Robert Halfon. Unions, he gushed, are “essential components of the Big Society. They are the largest voluntary groups in the UK. They are rooted in local communities, and are very much social entrepreneurs.” Anything, in short, except fighting organs of the working class!
Let Tweedledum and Tweedledummer squabble over who gets to sign the cheques to fund their respective campaigns in 2015. Meanwhile let the unions break with Labour, free themselves from the shackles of social democracy and get on with fighting for the class interest of the members upon whose subs they depend.
Unite’s response to Rigby death
In the course of a public statement commenting on the death of British soldier Lee Rigby, issued by the Greenwich branch of Unite with the stated intention of promoting “unity in the fight against racism, division and terror”, the union includes the following intriguing health warning:
We …recognise that there will be many other groups and organisations who will wish to seek to organise against the forces of racism and division. While welcome, there will be those who may not have roots in the area. Our request as a large, representative trade union that organises working people in this area is that there is a recognition that the trade unions based in the borough will along with others play a lead role. Therefore, let us unite and work together against those who seek to terrorise and divide.
What can this mean? Who are these mysterious folk without “roots in the area” whose “welcome” must be tempered with caution? What are the mysterious “other groups and organisations” which, it is hinted, might disrupt the even flow of Unite’s campaign against racism? This we are not told. Is the worry perhaps that someone, anyone, might actually stand up and point out the elephant in the room: the obvious connection between Rigby’s death and the death of so many millions of Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans and others at the hands of imperialism? Or that someone, anyone, may point out that the union’s chief beneficiary, the Labour party, has itself been the architect of much of this slaughter, and now actively supports the attempted subversion of independent Syria from the opposition benches?
The absence of even the slightest reference anywhere to imperialism’s global racism, played out in an endless string of criminal wars and assassinations, is indeed remarkable in a statement intending to unite workers in a struggle against racism, and can only be explained by the pernicious influence of Labour on the union. After scurrying in the first paragraph to “totally and without any reservation condemn the senseless and barbaric murder” of Rigby, not a peep of condemnation is to be heard of the innumerable war crimes which bloody the hands of British imperialism and inevitably bring in their train such individual acts of terror.
The truth is that the biggest obstacle to working class unity in the struggle against racism is the way that social democracy keeps the proletariat tied to the war chariot of imperialism. If anything can be said to undermine Unite’s efforts to push back the tide of racist panic, it is above all the influence of the Labour party.
If “large, representative trade unions that organise working people” like Unite are serious about fighting racist divisions in the working class , let them take the bold step of initiating a campaign of active non-cooperation with British imperialist war crimes. Let them instruct their own members to refuse to shift war supplies, print war propaganda or assist in any way with the imperialist war effort, and support them when they are penalised for taking this principled stand. And let them thereby demonstrate in practice, by their own actions the superiority of collective class struggle over individual acts of revenge.
Migrant workers up against exploitation in the Gulf
Migrant workers imported into the Gulf States on cheap wages and shoddy work conditions are starting to fight to improve their lot.
Labour sweated from Asian building workers living in filthy camps and earning on average between £88 and £134 a month is helping fuel a renewed blaze of grandiose speculative building projects in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere in the region. Projects include the construction of the Louvre museum and a branch of New York’s Guggenheim museum, both planned for Saadiyat island.
However the company contracted to build the Louvre museum, Arabtec, is running into problems with its workers, who recently went on strike for several days. Whilst Arabtec claimed an “amicable” settlement had been reached, the fragile state of industrial relations was apparent in the company’s assertion that “This unwarranted stoppage had been instigated by a minority group who will be held responsible for their actions.” Nervous bosses are perhaps calling to mind what happened in 2006 when a “minority group” of 2,500 workers employed to build an earlier Arabtec project, the Burj Khalifa tower, went on the rampage demanding a decent wage and decent living conditions.
Meanwhile women from the Philippines, India and Sri Lanka continue to suffer exploitation and abuse at the hands of those who employ them as domestic servants. Until recently Gulf employers resisted demands for a minimum wage and conditions with the plea that maids are not really workers but “part of the family” (like the dog perhaps). Fearful of losing this pool of cheap labour completely, Saudi Arabia has belatedly signed an agreement with the Manila government, granting Filipino maids a minimum wage of around £260 a month. Whether such regulation will translate into reality behind closed doors is highly dubious.
Maruti Suzuki
The heroic class struggle of the Maruti Suzuki workers continues to rage on. As reported earlier (see Proletarian, April 2013), the long-running struggle for union recognition and an end to contract labour fought by Maruti Suzuki workers in the Indian state of Harayana, in the teeth of violent opposition from both the company and from the state government, came to a head in July 2012 when tensions reached such a pitch that the plant was set ablaze and a supervisor died of smoke inhalation. A union statement explained:
“Since 18 July 2012, after the unfortunate incident in the factory premises as part of a management-woven conspiracy, we workers have been continually facing the brunt of repression. The company-management has at once terminated the jobs of over 1500 contract workers along with 546 permanent workers. They have, with the help of the state administration, heaped fabricated cases ranging from arson to murder on 211 of our fellow workers, while 149 workers, including our entire union leadership, have continued to languish in jail for the last six months. Keeping aside all legality, we workers and our families have continuously faced brute police atrocities.”
Undeterred, the struggle for the release of the jailed workers and the reinstatement of those sacked pressed on. From 24th March this year hunger strikes, deputations and rallies were organised, planned to culminate in a mass protest for the 19th May. This was to take the form of a “dharna”, which traditionally refers to the practice of a wronged person camping out on the doorstep of the wrongdoer and fasting until such time as redress is granted. In this case, the wrongdoers were the Haryana government and the Maruti management. As the union reported on the day of the protest, the response to this planned mass peaceful protest was swift and brutal.
“Around 150 of our fellow workers have been taken into custody at 11.30pm last night in Kaithal police station to prevent our call for Dharna and Gherao scheduled for today 19 May 2013. The number of those arrested has gone up since last night, as police continue to pick up workers and supporters from our homes, villages and streets. A state of curfew with Sec 144 clamped down on the entire town of Kaithal is on. As workers and supporters from across Haryana and other places are pouring in from the morning, CID and thousands of police are stationed in the Bus Station, Railway station and in the entire town and nearby villages and trying to stop their entry with barricades and tear gas, water cannons. We have decided to go ahead with the program. Thousands of people who are coming in solidarity will go ahead with the protest, and will sit on the road wherever they are stopped. We will try to march to the Industries Minister’s residence with our demands.”
As protestors approached the Minister’s residence, including many women, children and old men, they were met with over 2,000 riot cops who subjected them to beatings, water cannons and tear gas, resulting in hundreds of injuries requiring hospital admission. On 28th May, the union issued the following defiant statement:
“Our spirit of struggle has been further tempered in the hearth of repression. We are resolute to continue our struggle against the Maruti Suzuki management and Haryana government’s collusion with it, even as the Haryana police administration came down with brutal force to break our 57-day long dharna in Kaithal on 18-19th May and put 111 of us behind bars… We have decided to hold a protest demonstration and indefinite dharna from 1st June 2013 on, against the repressive actions of 18-19th May.”
Summer dates for the diary
22nd June. People’s Assembly. Central Hall Westminster, SW1H 9NH
29th June: Nationaon WC1H 9JE.
13th July Durham Miners Gala
17th August: commoration l Shop Stewards Network seventh annual conference. 11am-5pm, Camden Centre, Judd Street, Londof 1911 rail strike in Llanelli
